In vehicles, importance is increasingly attached to the fact that the operation, in this context specifically the operation of an actuator, e.g., a tailgate, from outside the vehicle is facilitated.
To reliably determine movements, specifically faster movements, and to identify them as gestures is no small task and it mostly required significant effort in sensor technology and/or computing power.
Insufficient movement information from capacitive sensors having an approximately 20 cm range complicates the detection of different movement patterns at long distance if, for example, distances of up to two meters should be considered.
The electricity consumption of gesture determination systems is too high due to the computing power required. Opening, closing the tailgate is only performed upon dwell time in an obtaining area and a directed movement of an individual object. The times taken for the foot to dwell per kick or also the time in a regional late detection area slow down the opening of the tailgate.
Optical systems operate with reflecting methods so that the object determination depends on the degree of reflection of the feet or the leg. Consequently, the distance between foot and sensor may differ greatly. To remove by calculation a vector from the chronological images increases the required computing power of the existing processor, and thus the standby current and the necessary computing power of the processor rise disproportionately.
DE 10 2008 052 928 A1 discloses an apparatus for determining gestures in an image, comprising a Hough transformer designed to identify elements in the image or in a preprocessed version of the image as identified gesture elements which are then compared to a database.
DE 10 2011 082 881 A1 discloses a method for illustrating the environment of the motor vehicle in a particular view in a motor vehicle, wherein spatial information, e.g., depth information or spatial coordinates, is determined with regard to the image information recorded, e.g., by means of a stereo triangulation procedure.
DE 10 2013 004 073 A1 discloses a method for determining activities obtained in video streams for monitoring. It is provided here that data relating to frame differences is accumulated for frame sequences in fields, gradients and/or value difference intervals are determined in the accumulator fields, and activity is concluded from the gradients.
It is now the object of the invention to lower the structural requirements relating to the determination of gestures.